1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an object detecting device, and more specifically relates to an object detecting device that detects identified objects such as a person from an imaged image, an imaging device, a processing method thereof, and a program for a computer to execute the method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Hitherto, a subject recognizing technique has been proposed, in which there is recognized what a subject is that is included in an imaged image generated by an imaging device such as a digital still camera or digital video camera (e.g. an integrated camera/recorder or the like). As a subject recognizing technique, for example a face-detecting technique has been proposed that detects the face of a person from the imaged image with the image processing using feature amounts such as luminance and color. It is conceivable that a person can be detected using this detecting technique. However, in the case that the object of detection is a person, the color of clothing and so forth often differ depending on the person, whereby it is assumed to be difficult to detect a person with the image processing using feature amounts such as luminance and color.
Accordingly, an object detecting technique has been proposed, for example, that detects objects such as a person or a vehicle using outlines of objects to be detected. For example, a technique has been proposed that performs object detection using a gradient oriented histogram (HOG: Histograms of Oriented Gradients) which is a type of histogram of luminance in multiple regions within an image (frequency distribution) (e.g. see “Histograms of Oriented Gradients for Human Detection”, Navneet Dalal, 2005″.) A gradient oriented histogram is created by dividing a target image into multiple regions for example, computing the gradient intensity and gradient orientation of the luminance for each region, and based on the gradient intensity and gradient orientation of the luminance thereof.